Gaming establishments have recognized the value of building customer loyalty through identifying frequent customers and rewarding them for their patronage. These rewards are typically referred to as comping or promotions. To properly identify customers that are deserving of special comp rewards, automated player tracking technologies exist to accurately identify these individuals. Each particular player's gaming activity enables gaming establishments to target which individual players deserve to receive promotions or comps. A player tracking system typically includes one or more devices which track and store information regarding one or more aspects of a player's gaming activity. Such systems include issuing individual player tracking cards to one or more players, wherein each time a player participates in a qualified gaming activity, the gaming system associates and stores the player's gaming activity with the player's player tracking account. Based on this stored information or data, the gaming establishment classifies each player and provides one or more of such players certain benefits based on these classifications and their gaming activity.
In existing player tracking systems, a player is issued a player identification card which has an encoded player identification number that uniquely identifies the player. Player tracking on gaming devices, such as slot machines, is frequently accomplished with a card reader mounted in the gaming device. When the player first sits down at a gaming machine, the player inserts the card into the card reader. The card reader reads the player identification number from the card and communicates information through a network to a central computer regarding the player's subsequent gaming activity until the player cashes out or removes their card.
Certain casinos try to make promotions or comps more personal. One known way certain casinos try to personalize promotions is by providing an optional survey for players to fill out upon registration for a player tracking program. However, players often neglect to fill out the survey because it is burdensome. Other players are not aware that the survey exists. Casinos and players also have an interest in a player using the time necessary to fill out the survey to participate in other activities. For example, the player may want to play games or make other use of their leisure or pleasure time.
Additionally, many surveys do not ask the right questions or enough questions to have a level of detail to provide the player promotions based on the surveys. The players that actually fill out the surveys only fill them out at the time of registering for player programs. The casinos do not update the surveys and player's tastes or preferences often change.
Casinos incur costs in providing or sending out promotional materials to players. The players that receive the promotions need to be targeted to ensure they are of the player group that would possibly use the promotions. Even so, many promotions go unredeemed by players. To provide better promotions to the players which may use or benefit from the promotions, more and better information is needed than the information currently provided by the known systems. For example, more detailed information is needed to perform regression analysis to determine which players to provide which promotions.
It is thus very desirable for a gaming establishment to be able to determine which customers to provide with personalized comps, promotions and incentives.